Chapter 61: Chapter 61: Origin Essence

Everything hurt.

Runar’s first thought after the collision was simple: Am I dead?

He tried to move. Nothing happened. Tried to open his eyes. No eyes to open. His body was gone—completely gone. And his soul… his soul felt wrong. Fragmented. Like someone had taken his consciousness and shattered it into a million pieces.

What the hell happened?

Memories came back slowly. The 3,333 orbital spheres. All of them accelerating to light speed at once. The collision. The explosion.

Oh. Right. I smashed everything into my dantian to create a Universal Seed.

Guess it worked. Sort of.

His awareness was scattered. He could perceive things, but from a million different angles at once. It was disorienting as hell. Most of what he saw was just chaos—swirling white space, torrents of qi flowing everywhere, crackling energy.

But one thing stood out clearly.

A seed. Floating in the void. Tiny—maybe the size of a grain of sand. It glowed with faint rainbow light, pulsing slowly like a heartbeat.

That’s my dantian now. The Universal Seed. Everything I built—all 3,333 spheres, the black hole core, every Law I infused—compressed down into that tiny thing.

Around it, the Infinite Qi Realm was going crazy.

Massive whirlpools of liquid spiritual energy spiraled toward the seed, pouring in constantly. The sound was deafening—like standing next to a waterfall the size of a planet. Formations cracked under the strain, sharp sounds echoing through the space. Temperature fluctuated wildly. Absolute cold here, star-level heat there, switching randomly.

Okay. So I’m not dead. Just… scattered. My soul broke into pieces when my body exploded.

A fragment of his consciousness drifted closer to the seed. Another fragment stayed far away. They were all him, but separated. Unable to act together. Just watching.

Is this permanent? Am I stuck like this?

Panic tried to rise, but it felt muted. Distributed across too many fragments to build up properly.

Think. I designed this technique myself. Did I plan for this?

He forced himself to remember. When he’d created Eternal Nexus Ascension, he’d only mapped it through Satellite Orbit. Each major realm needed its own technique design—he had to comprehend the next stage before breaking through.

He’d spent months theorizing Planetary Core. The notes came back to him now. “To birth a universe, one must first become scattered stardust.”

I thought that was just poetic language. Turns out it was literal.

Relief washed over him. This was supposed to happen. His body dying, his soul shattering—all part of the process. The seed would grow, mature, then rebuild him from scratch.

I’m not dying. I’m being reborn.

Time passed. How much, he couldn’t tell. Could’ve been minutes or hours. The seed kept pulsing. Growing very slowly. Absorbing the infinite qi that poured into it.

His scattered consciousness just floated there, waiting.

And waiting and waiting.

Then one of his fragments remembered something important.

The origin essence.

The memory spread through all his fragments instantly. During his 333rd stage breakthrough, the Universal Will—Willith—had given him a piece of origin essence. The fundamental material that reality was made from. He’d only used about 5% of it back then, sealing the rest away in his soul space.

I still have 95% left. And my soul is right here.

He looked at the seed again. It was growing, yes. But slowly. Very slowly. The infinite qi was pouring in constantly, but the seed seemed to need massive amounts before it would mature. Quantity over quality—billions of tons of qi compressed down until it finally triggered a qualitative change.

At this rate, it could take months. Maybe years.

But the origin essence…

Origin essence wasn’t like normal qi. It was already at the highest quality. Feeding it to the seed wouldn’t just add more fuel—it would directly enhance the seed itself. Speed up the maturation process. Make it ready for germination much faster.

I should use it.

The problem was, he didn’t have hands. Didn’t have a body. His soul was scattered into fragments that couldn’t really do anything.

But then he realized—the essence was sealed in his soul space. His soul was here. All the fragments were parts of the same soul. And the seal was made from 184 Laws.

I know 3,333 Laws now. Breaking a 184-Law seal should be easy.

He focused inward. The seal appeared in his awareness—patterns of Fire Law, Ice Law, Space Law, Time Law, and 180 others woven together. It had seemed complex when he’d made it. Now it looked almost simple.

Break.

The seal unraveled smoothly. Lines of light unwound, the whole structure dissolving.

The origin essence emerged from the seal.

Runar’s consciousness froze.

Even scattered across a million fragments, he could feel the sheer power of what he was looking at. It appeared as a sphere of pure, compressed energy. Not qi—something more fundamental. Like condensed reality itself. Brilliant light that seemed to contain every color at once, but compressed down so tightly it almost looked white.

And inside it, he could see thousands of tiny fragments floating. They weren’t made of qi or spiritual energy. They were pieces of Rules—the foundational code that governed how reality worked.

This is what Willith gave me. Not just power. Knowledge. Understanding.

For a moment, he wanted to study it. Examine each Rule fragment individually. The programmer in him was screaming to catalogue everything, understand the structure.

But the cultivator in him knew better.

The seed needs this. I can study it later—after I’m not a scattered consciousness floating around helplessly.

He reached out with his will, commanding the essence to move.

It responded immediately.

The sphere of origin essence flowed through space toward the seed. Not slowly—fast, like it recognized where it was supposed to go.

It touched the Universal Seed.

And merged.

The change was instant.

The seed grew. Not slowly anymore—rapidly. Grain of sand to marble in a single heartbeat. The surface changed, developing intricate patterns that looked almost crystalline. Light poured from it, brilliant and intense.

It’s working!

Marble to fist-sized. The patterns on the surface became more complex. The light intensified. The gravity around it increased dramatically.

Fist-sized to basketball-sized. The whirlpools of qi became violent, the roar louder. The formations cracked more, struggling to contain the energy.

One of Runar’s soul fragments drifted too close. The seed’s gravity caught it and pulled it in.

Wait—

The fragment merged with the seed before he could react.

Runar’s whole consciousness jerked. Part of him was suddenly inside the seed instead of outside. The perspective shift was dizzying.

More fragments got pulled in. Dozens. Hundreds. The seed’s gravity kept increasing as it grew, pulling harder.

His consciousness started reassembling. Pieces coming back together. Memories reconnecting. His sense of self becoming whole again.

I’m being unified. The soul needs to be complete before the body can reform.

Thousands of fragments merged. Tens of thousands. The process accelerated into a flood.

Finally, the last fragment merged.

Runar’s consciousness snapped into clarity. He was whole again. One unified mind instead of scattered pieces. Still no body, but at least he was himself again.

And in that moment of reunification, something happened.

The Rule fragments inside the origin essence—all thousands of them—resonated.

A wave of understanding hit him like a physical force.

His Runic Omniscient Eyes activated automatically, and he saw the Rule fragments clearly for the first time. They were organizing themselves. Connecting. Forming patterns.

And they were teaching him.

His 3,333 Laws—all at perfect 100% mastery—suddenly felt incomplete like an ant. Like he’d been reading the table of content instead of the actual book.

Take Fire Law. He knew it perfectly. Could create fire, control heat, manipulate combustion. Total mastery.

But the Rule fragment showed him something deeper. Fire wasn’t just a phenomenon he could control. It was an expression of the Thermodynamic Exchange Rule—the principle that governed why energy moved from hot to cold, why entropy increased.

The Law let him use fire. The Rule showed him why fire existed in the first place.

Oh. Laws aren’t the foundation. They’re built on top of Rules.

Understanding flooded in. Not words or images—direct knowledge transfer. His Fire Law touched the Thermodynamic Exchange Rule fragment and evolved.

100% Law mastery became 1% Rule comprehension.

Just 1%. But the difference was massive. With Rule comprehension, he could do things Law mastery couldn’t touch. Adjust entropy rates. Make fire burn in absolute zero. Create flames that absorbed heat instead of releasing it.

And it wasn’t stopping with Fire.

Ice Law evolved to 1% Thermodynamic Reduction Rule.

Lightning Law evolved to 1% Electromagnetic Excitation Rule.

Space Law evolved to 1% Dimensional Framework Rule.

Time Law evolved to 1% Causality Sequence Rule.

One after another. Faster and faster. All 3,333 of his Laws touching Rule fragments and evolving simultaneously.

His consciousness burned from the information overload. If he’d had a physical brain, it would’ve melted. But as pure consciousness in the seed, he could handle it. Barely.

The process felt like it took hours. Probably lasted seconds.

When it stopped, all 3,333 Laws had reached 1% Rule comprehension.

Runar’s consciousness hung there, exhausted and changed.

So this is a Rule.

Laws were tools. Powerful tools that let cultivators manipulate reality.

Rules were the blueprints that determined what those tools could do in the first place.

Even 1% Rule comprehension made him fundamentally different. His understanding of reality had expanded beyond anything he’d known before.

And he’d done it for 3,333 concepts at once.

Cultivators who reach 1% Rule comprehension in a single Law are considered legends. I just did it for over three thousand.

No pride in the thought. Just fact.

Around him, the origin essence continued merging with the seed. The Rule fragments were being woven into its structure like DNA. The seed kept growing—basketball-sized to watermelon-sized. Its mass increased far beyond what its size suggested. The gravity it produced was now comparable to a small moon.

Outside, the Infinite Qi Realm was barely holding together. Whirlpools violent enough to shred planets. Formations cracked like broken glass. Temperature swings so extreme that matter flickered between states. Time dilation going haywire—minutes in seconds in some spots, hours in seconds in others.

And through it all, infinite qi kept pouring in. Being absorbed, processed through the Rule fragments, converted into something new.

Runar felt everything. The qi flows. The Rule resonances. The structures forming inside the seed.

The origin essence is almost fully integrated. The Rule fragments are part of the seed’s foundation now. My Laws have touched Rules.

Next, the seed blooms. And when it does, my body gets rebuilt. Not restored—constructed from scratch. Every cell, every bone, every organ made from Rules instead of qi.

He’d become something new. Something unprecedented.

The thought should’ve scared him. Instead, he felt ready.

Let creation begin.

The Universal Seed pulsed in response. Deep and resonant, like a heartbeat.

The next phase began.

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